Creating a way of living each day, still including travel tales, and appreciation of places, events, and cultures, but also thoughtful examination of life and all that entails.
I welcome any and all questions, comments, arguments, refutations, criticisms... sea stories..

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

A brief update

Little new on the homestead, except for the acquisition of a few slabs, those being the bits cut off the sides of timbers when they are milled into lumber. These slabs will hopefully serve as the shoring, or part of the shoring system, for the U-house.

Weather has been alternating between cold (in the teens F) and rainy, and somewhat moderately tolerable, with the latter being the less frequent of the two.

Decided on some important design changes necessitated by not being able to sink the posts into the ground as per the normal method. I am going to drive re-bar all around each post into the rock and then pour concrete around the post and re-bar. Then I am going to run 6 inch in diameter cedars from the base of one post to the base of another post downhill, for each post. This will create a box structure firmly tied to the underlying rock, and prevent the posts from trying to push inward from the weight of the soil on the outside.

With any luck I will start to work on setting posts in the very near future.

"How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." — Edward Abbey

"I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. " — Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience)

"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn." — Henry David Thoreau

"A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living." — Henry David Thoreau